Piwik2008

restrospective

LondonSaturday, 5th July 2008

Timeline• June 15th 2007

Piwik software design starts! • July 17th 2007

Piwik.org domain creation • January 4th 2008

Piwik.org website ~ 10 visitors per day dev.piwik.org opens

• March 28th 2008 Piwik first public release 0.1.1

Best New Features

• February 2008, by Julien Customisable dashboard

• March 2008, by Maciej Automatic outlink + downloads tracking

• April 2008, by Maciej & Matt i18n implementation: Piwik can be translated! (longest Trac ticket in Piwik’s history #62)

• June 2008, by Matt huge performance and memory improvements Piwik can now handle +1M visits per month

Piwik versions• 545 commits

•15 new versions

•16,000 downloads!

Traffic overview

The first months of Piwik have been very fun, as the web buzzed a

lot about us!I built these graphs using the Piwik API to get the web analytics data

Delicious.com homepage(again!)

Delicious.com homepage(for a few hours)

Smashing magazine article

-Stumbleupon.com buzz- linuxfr.org homepage- reddit.org homepage

Server crash, moving to new server

- Readwriteweb.com article- ostatic.com article

~ 80 visits per day

BUZZ! ~ 2500 visits per day

~ 900 visits per day

They buzzed!

And generated a lot of traffic that helped increase awareness of Piwik

ostatic.com

linuxfr.org

webappers.com

reddit.com

readwriteweb.com

.NET Magazine, July edition

Overview of the community

Building a developers community is one of our

ultimate goal.Where are we today?

Developers TRAC•+100 users registered

• 272 tickets created– 88 fixed – (40 duplicates or invalid)– 144 still opened

Mailing list• Piwik-hackers– interesting questions & use cases– 60 members

Plugins• Developers slowly start to write plugins• GeoIp Localization Plugin

Better user geo-localization, reports visitors by cities #45• Translation Tool Plugin

Makes life easy for translators, provides a GUI to write the translations #171

• Simple integration of Piwik in other CMSUsers have written simple plugins for their CMS to easily include the Piwik JS code for Drupal, Wordpress,

Dotclear, Dokuwiki, Mediawiki, Typo3• Video Tracking

Provides video usage reports (video loaded, played, 10% completed, 90% completed, etc.). Shiny user interface.

Users community

What do people think about Piwik?

Piwik has an international audience

+ long tail...

Thanks for building a great product. Even thought it is Beta I have installed it on a new shopping site that I am building. It is running side by side with Google Analytics.

- Patrick

I must tell you we are REALLY EXCITED about the promise of Piwik. We currently use Google Analytics and are desperate to use something that we can control, like Piwik.

- Todd

Found Piwik last week and I’ve been really excited about it. I’ve been testing it out on a few sites and am _really_ excited about the possibilities that an API offers.I’m not sure if I could help, but I’d love to help where I can.

- Bett

I personally have a bit of experience working with Ominute, Hitbox, and Google Analytics, and the idea of an open source alternative to these tools sounds very exciting. Across our network of sites, we average about 60m pageviews / month and growing, and I was wondering if that level of load is within the scope of Piwik, given the proper hardware to support it. I’d love to find a way to help the Piwik project get to the point where it could handle millions of pageviews / month.

- Jonathan

29 readers

527 readers

Team Updates• Julien unfortunately left after his huge work on

Piwik (customizable dashboard). He is busy with his new life, but may come back in the future

• Thierry (Spain) stepped in to help with Marketing, is starting a business using Piwik.

• Maciej (Poland) submitted several patches and new features that were included in the SVN.He is starting a business using Piwik as a foundation part.

• Noah (US) is managing all the translators and is doing a great job!

Current Team• Matt, Project Leader• Maciej, Core Contributor• Johan, System Operations• Thierry, Marketing• Noah, Translations Manager

We’ve done well!

What are the positive points of these first 6 months?

Good points• Feedback is very positive!• Bloggers blog about Piwik• Most people believe the potential

is huge, and keep an eye on Piwik• Developers like and use the APIs• piwik.org is already #2 on “web

analytics” on Google

Good points• It seems we are using the right

tools, efficient dev architecture: Trac, svn, mailing lists, easy to push new releases via script Kudos Johan

• The testing platform was very useful, and helped us find and fix important performance issues Kudos Thierry and Johan

Good points• Internationalization of Piwik has

been a huge success• Recruiting Noah made a

significant difference• Translators have worked hard– already 9 translations available– many more to come!

But we’ve learnt from some mistakes

This why this retrospective is useful: looking back and

determining what went wrong

Getting People to Contribute

• We’ve received many love messages from people who wanted to help

• But it was hard for them to get started for several reasons:–many talkers (“I’d love to help! What

can I do?” “I don’t have time actually, sorry”)

– ... very few Do-ers! –we also managed badly this potential

help from new people

What can we do better?

We shall not repeat the same mistakes again

Getting more help• Create a page “How to contribute to Piwik?”

it would list all the ways one can help (design, development+links to tickets that can be implemented, marketing, documentation, usability, security, etc.)

• Very simple example plugins + tutorials(also explain that people should contact us or add trac tickets if changes in the core are required)

• Add more context and thoughts in the ticketsTickets in TRAC are often incomplete and miss context. People don’t have time to investigate themselves.

• Recruit a Documentation ManagerPiwik needs somebody to build a better documentation. Obvious missing documentation: list of features, requirements, how to install Piwik, how to update Piwik...

Make Piwik Better

• There are many other ideas and tasks we will tackle: scalability, widgets, third party integration, new features• We will discuss this in the

afternoon presentation: “Shaping the future of Piwik”

Conclusion• First 6 months have been exciting:

very positive response from the community

• Piwik solves a problem that many people and companies have: the demand and potential is huge

• We have lots to do, and need more great people to join the team!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaredchapman/482538719/

http://piwik.org